Children of Beslan

[Pure]

pops opined,

pops: So you and Rgraham it appears have no real sympathy for the murder of completely innocent school children

Learn to read,
I said,

//no bloody act excuses another//

pops: most of whom weren't even born when the Chechen war took off...

Chechen kids are dying to this day. Again, read your newspaper.

I see only excuses for it

Where exactly? I said, One bloody act provokes another. That is not an excuse, simply a fact about human beings.

rather than any attempt to follow the purpose of this thread, and wish to post some feeling of horror at yet another bunch of fanatics causing the death of innocents.

I have no problem with 'posting some feeling of horror' PROVIDED it's not selective. I sure Sher isn't. I haven't researched your foolishness, but likely you've been cheering on Blair and Bush for some time.

Shit you two aresholes take the fucking biscuit...

A little namecalling really strengthens your case. Oops, there is no case, I forgot.

As to Colly's casiustry:
There was in particular no premeditated plan to kill children.

This was applied to US in Iraq. Is Colly *really* trying to apply it to the Russians in Chechnya?

If not, I rest my case. What is it: Blood will have blood. It's all fucking sad, but it's important to focus outrage on the main perpetrators, which have always been states. (Here, Russia, for the reading challenged.)

 

[shereads]

It's terrible, subhuman, and despicable, but I'd like to know the difference between the innocent Russian victims and the 10,000 innocent Iraqi victims of our invasion.

Is it more excusable if you kill under the pretext of removing a dictator? Or are the Iraqi deaths easier to take because there are no front page photos?

---dr.M.

There is no difference. Dead children are dead children.

 

[shereads]

Jesus. You start a thread, you go to the mall to buy bubble bath and dirty paperback novels, and the next thing you know it's WWIV.

This has turned out to be a less than promising millennium, so far, for small and powerless people who are in the way of some "greater good." I think we're all reacting to that. It pisses us off. Thank God for that. The fact that our helplessness and anger take our thoughts in different directions - some punitive, some introspective - doesn't mean that anybody lacks compassion for these babies and their families. The people who don't care aren't likely to bother to read and post here.

For some people, grief over something this senseless leads to us to question how/if/when we ourselves might be accountable, by our actions or inactions, in the unwarranted deaths of children as innocent as these - in Africa, Chechnya, Iraq. It doesn't mean we lack compassion. It means we're wired differently, that's all. Speaking just for myself, I wish I could feel a distinction between the unwarranted deaths of chidren by terrorism vs. as the result of a calculated "acceptable risk" of collateral damage. We may not target children when we bomb cities, but neither are we so naive that we believe there will not be any children under the rubble. Some of us find that risk less acceptable than others. It doesn't mean we grieve less. It means we grieve differently.

I defy anybody here to convince anybody else that your personal expression of grief and the depth of your compassion is more meaningful, more respectful or more personally painful because your thoughts take you in different directions as you try to comprehend the state of mind that enables people to use innocent lives as bargaining chips - or to treat their loss as an acceptable risk.

There. It was my thread and I'm done with it. Use it for old movie quotes or beat each other senseless.

But if you people make me stop this car, we're turning it around and canceling the trip to Disneyland.

 

[herecomestherain]

Shereads wrote [qoute]But if you people make me stop this car, we're turning it around and canceling the trip to Disneyland.[/quote]

"Are we nearly there yet?"



Thanks for starting the thread.